I.M Gelfand, hail & farewell

[Dave Haan]

Israil Moiseevich Gelfand, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, died October 5 at the age of 96. He was the author of more than 800 articles and 30 books in many areas of mathematics--including commutative normed rings, representation theory, generalized functions, and partial differential equations ...

from ams news, via Terry Tao:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/israel-gelfand/
I found his Calculus of Variations (w/ S.V. Fomin, in trans) clear and useful, but that's old work (Dover reprint) ... he's in the roots of many branches of mathematics now getting attention in finance.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Such a great loss.
On a good note, Terry Tao is very young yet so talented. We used to have weekly seminar to study his papers in additive combinatorics and number theory. I've met Van Vu and Ben Green at the NYC area conferences. Vu was at UCLA then and now at Rutgers.
I wonder if number theory has any application in finance.